Vaccination? Non merci

This is the latest in a POLITICO special report on vaccines: the accomplishments, history, controversy and business challenges.

France’s health minister got more than she bargained for when she promised a nationwide debate on the benefits and risks of vaccination this spring.

The government is seeking to tackle parents’ growing mistrust on the topic, and to streamline vaccination rules that many consider confusing. But the public debate is slow to come and already under fire from those it was meant to appease.

“There’s so much hypocrisy, it’s like tossing us a bone, but we know that the debate will be completely biased,” said Jacques Bessin, who leads a federation of patient groups that favor natural therapies and are skeptical of vaccines.

Health Minister Marisol Touraine said the consultation will be open and fair, with “no taboo.” But an official leading the Conférence nationale de santé — a group representing patients and health care professionals — resigned with much fanfare earlier this year, calling the whole enterprise a farce, in effect biased in favor of vaccine promotion.

The task for the minister’s cabinet, which did not reply to repeated interview requests, is a tough one.

More than 20 percent of the French don’t support vaccination, more than double from 2009, according to the national prevention institute INPES. Many experts say the government’s clumsy handling of a worldwide flu pandemic that began that year caused confidence to crash.

It’s part of a wider trend in pockets across the globe, dubbed “vaccination hesitancy” by health authorities and pharmaceutical companies. Falling vaccination rates in some European countries, they say, is causing diseases like measles and rubella to resurface on the Continent.

While France is one of the world’s rich countries with the highest immunization rates for diphtheria and tetanus — for which the government has made vaccination mandatory — it’s one of the worst performers when it comes to vaccinating babies against measles and hepatitis B, according to OECD data.

“Vaccine hesitancy is an important problem in Europe, and particularly in France,” Daniel Floret, professor of pediatrics at Lyon University and former chairman of France’s immunization technical advisory group, told a life sciences conference last week.

“Perhaps most worrisome is that this loss of confidence in vaccines doesn’t just affect the general public, but also health care professionals,” said Philippe Lamoureux, general manager of the LEEM French pharma trade association.

Complacency

A quarter of French general practitioners aren’t confident about the risks and efficacy of vaccines, according to a 2015 report by the health ministry, which found the result “preoccupying.”

And less than half of GPs felt confident explaining to their patients why some vaccines contain adjuvants — substances such as aluminum that aim to boost the immune response, and which some parents blame for serious side effects.

Benoît Vallet, France’s director-general for health, said his services were meeting with doctors every two months to address their concerns, including on vaccine safety.

“We need to regain the confidence of health care workers,” Vallet told POLITICO. “Some have a guarded stance on vaccination. It’s generally just a handful of doctors, but they manage to get a lot of attention.”

One doctor in particular has been making headlines in France: Henri Joyeux, a cancer specialist, has questioned the need for some mass vaccination campaigns, such as those against human papillomavirus, a cause of cervical cancer. He contends that only populations at risk should be vaccinated, instead of all girls and boys above a certain age.

Joyeux, who did not reply to an interview request, says on his website he is not against vaccines, but against ‘lobbies’ pushing for vaccination on a big scale when it is not needed.

Among the concerns of the general public pushing back, at least in rich countries, are the potential risks of getting vaccinated. Some cite an infamous and retracted study in the British journal the Lancet that suggested a link between vaccines and autism. Other online claims include that the jabs can cause other severe disorders, from autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis and Guillain-Barré syndrome.

Thomas Breuer, chief medical officer at GlaxoSmithKline Vaccines, told POLITICO that part of the problem is that the public doesn’t see victims of polio or other diseases in their daily life.

“We’re stumbling on our own success,” he said. “Because diseases are not visible anymore, people become complacent. They’re not anti-vaccine, it’s just that it’s not on people’s minds anymore.”

Flu vaccine suspicion

Researchers say today’s defiance in France highlights growing mistrust towards health authorities, with the swine flu pandemic of 2009-2010 often cited as a milestone in the confidence drop.

When that outbreak was declared a global health emergency, authorities fast-tracked vaccines onto the market and governments rushed to buy them. France, with a population of 63 million, initially requested 94 million doses, but it halved its order when the epidemic turned out to be much milder than feared.

In the end, less than 6 million people in France went to get vaccinated — including the health minister, grinning for the cameras — and the government later scrambled to offload its excess vaccines. The whole campaign cost around €600 million.

“There was a feeling governments had overreacted to something that looked pretty much like the seasonal flu. Then came allegations of conflicts of interests between health authorities and the vaccine industry,” said Jocelyn Raude, sociologist and lecturer at EHESP School of Public Health in Rennes.

He noted that most hesitant parents aren’t opposed to vaccination altogether, but are skeptical about specific vaccines, typically following reports of side effects or health scandals. This leads to a pick-and-choose approach to immunization.

A number of hesitant parents complain they cannot give their kids just the three vaccinations required by French law.

“We don’t like to be put all in one basket as ‘anti-vaccination.’ We’re pro-freedom,” said UNACS’ Bessin, who has two children who were never vaccinated. “Why can’t those who believe in vaccination get vaccinated, and those who don’t believe in it don’t?”

Leaving it up to parents to vaccinate their children, the minister and other public health experts argue, could dent so-called herd immunity: That’s when a big enough chunk of a community is immunized against a disease, leaving little opportunity for an outbreak and protecting most members of the community, including those who are not vaccinated.

Bessin is among those demanding the end of mandatory vaccination, which in France applies for diphtheria, tetanus and polio; vaccines for other diseases such as whooping cough are only “recommended.”

The health minister has said the distinction is obsolete and gives the impression some vaccines are more important than others, when in fact the government backs all of them. But she has ruled out changing the system just yet, for fear it would cause vaccination rates to plummet further.

A number of hesitant parents complain they cannot give their kids just the three vaccinations required by French law, because the only jabs available nowadays pack up to six shots, including against hepatitis B or meningitis.

A petition from Joyeux demanding a return to basic (and cheaper) aluminum-free vaccines exclusively against diphtheria, tetanus and polio has drawn more than a million signatures since it was launched a year ago.

And in one case that went all the way to France’s supreme court, a couple was handed a suspended two month jail sentence for refusing to immunize their kids on the grounds that a basic three-in-one vaccine was not available.

The public pressure may be paying off.

The health minister met with industry representatives in February and they agreed to better communicate with each other to ensure a more stable supply, and to address parents’ requests for three-in-one vaccines.

“When we get these types of requests we try to satisfy them, but we only get about a couple hundred of them each year,” said Lamoureux, of the LEEM pharma lobby.

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J

That’s actually a very interesting subject.
If we consider that every vaccine has a probability, small as it may be, of leading to undesired side effects, then because of Murphy’s law, the more vaccines one takes, the likelier he/she will be of experiencing undesired side effects. Therefore, a choice must be made.
Is there a doctor reading this article? what is the best strategy to be vaccinated efficiently without maximizing the risk of running into problems? what kind of side effects can be affected for the various vaccines which are on offer?

Posted on 4/27/16 | 8:17 AM CET

C VH

@J
Two things. 1. Your math is wrong. See it as the chance of winning Euromillions. Your chances of winning stay exactly the same (1 in 116,531,800) however many times you play. The same goes for the vaccine; the chance of having side effects stays the same, however many shots you get. That’s the math. 2. Add the biology and your chances of having severe side effects drop significantly once you safely got your very first shot. E.g. the worst possible side effect of a vaccine is an allergic reaction and having had one vaccine shows doctors you are not allergic to vaccines, thus odds of hving a severe reaction are even more negligible than before.

Posted on 4/27/16 | 5:21 PM CET

Steve Hinks

ALL vaccines are SAFE and EFFECTIVE! They have been approved following clinical trials.
Then why were the following withdrawn?
Trivirix MMR vaccine made by GSK Canada caused meningitis, Plusrix MMR vaccine made by GSK UK caused meningitis, Immravax MMR vvacine made by Aventis Pasteur caused meningitis, Rotashield rotavirus vaccine made by Wyeth Lederle caused bowel obstruction, Polio vaccine made by Medeva caused vCJD, the human form of mad cow disease, Lymerix Lyme disease vaccine made by GSK caused Lyme disease and severe arthritis, BCG vaccine made by PowderJect did not meet the end-of-shelf-life specification, Imovax hepatitis B, polio and Haemophilus influenzae type B made by Aventis Pasteur tested positive for the live vaccine, Hexovac diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough vaccine made by Sanofi Merck provided inadequate protection, PedvaxHIB haemophilus influenzae type B vaccine made by Merck was contaminated with a bacteria called Bacillus cereus, Comvax haemophilius B and hepatitis B vaccine made by Merck was contaminated with a bacteria called Bacillus cereus, Menjugate meningitis C vaccine made by Novartis was infected with bacteria Staphylococcus aureus, Fluvax flu vaccine made by CSL caused seizures, Preflucel flu vaccine made by Baxter Healthcare caused fatigue, muscle pain and headaches and Pandemrix flu vaccine made by GSK caused narcolepsy.

The risk of an adverse reaction might be, say, 1 in 1000. If I get two shots it is 1 in 1000 x 2, 100 shots and it’s 1 in 1000 x 100.

The risk per shot may not change but each shot incrementally increases total risk.

Each time the immune system is activated there is a chance the glial cells stay turned on and continue to excrete IL-6 and other pro-inflammatory cytokines. This is the primary mechanism behind vaccines adverse reactions that can lead to death because they create a cytokine storm.

Posted on 4/30/16 | 8:04 PM CET

Tom Cullem

This is what happens as cultures erode and memory gets short – how many millions died in the great diphtheria epidemic of 1918? How many millions either died or were permanently disfigured by small pox? How many children were crippled for life by poliomyelitis? Does anyone at all remember the depredations of tuberculosis before antibiotics were pioneered? Is anyone unhappy with the prospect of an Ebola vaccine?

These vaccines represent some of the greatest triumphs of Western scientific methodology and progress. The anti-vaccine movement is a form of hysteria that is made possible by growing distance between Europeans and their own history, which in turn is being made possible, yet again, by the flabby fuzzy thinking of too much relativism and not enough critical reasoning.

Natural therapies? Really? For diphtheria? Smallpox? German measles? Polio? Based on what sort of research? Oh wait: this kind of thinking doesn’t require research.

Another landmark in the descent of European civilisation as governments do anything to pander to people who they should tell to be grateful for where they’d been born and when; that would be the same governments to frightened to protect those same cultures in other ways.

If it weren’t so tragic hearing these people talk about “natural therapies” against killers like polio and diphtheria, it would be comical.

Posted on 5/1/16 | 6:01 PM CET

Kat

Get rid of the ingredients KNOWN to cause diseased (like aluminum, mersol, SQUALENE, ETC.) And there will be FAR less opposition to vaccines.
Did you know that 1 bottle of Vaccine without Squalene treats 10 patients, while that same amount with Squalene treats 100 patients?! Do you also know that Squalene has been linked to LUPUS, ALS, MS, ETC. In Soldiers, Veterans?! Do you also know that the ONLY way to be tested for AntiSqualeneAntibodies is with a class action lawsuit AND a COURT ORDER?
EVERYONE WHO’S EVER BEEN VACCINATED WILL TEST POSITIVE!!